Ok, I passed the entry quest (64 naq) into the stargate questline, and the followup quest was easy (make one alloy out of 2 naq). After completing that, it opens up 3 quests which I assume is the blocks needed to actually build a stargate. I must say, even with the naq changes coming, I still can't see myself completing a stargate with the current recipes and timers.
I started doing the math to add up all of the time and naq I would need to mine and process to complete the 3 quests:
Each chevron block requires 4 ring blocks, and you need 7, so that's 28 ring blocks.
Stargate base requires 4 ring blocks, so that makes 32 ring blocks total.
Third quest requires 8 ring blocks, so that makes 40 ring blocks total.
Each ring block requires 3 naq alloy ingots, and each of these ingots require 2 naquadah, so 6 per ring block.
40 ring blocks comes up to a total of 120 naquadah alloy ingots, or a total of 240 naquadah!
So lets take a look at making this:
Each naq alloy ingot needs to be cooked in an alloy furnace for 7,000,000 RF. From what I could tell when I researched it, alloy furnace cook times are calculated based on the amount of RF required divided by the speed of your capacitor, 20 Rf/t for none, 60 Rf/t for double, and 100 Rf/t for oct. Using an oct, and assuming 20 ticks per second, that comes up to 2k Rf/s. Since you need to spend 7 million Rf, this will take 3500 seconds with an oct capacitor, or approximately 1 hour. With no capacitor, that time goes up to 5 hours. Mind you, you need to do this 120 times. The only thing I can think of to speed this up is to make like a zillion alloy furnaces just to process naq, but the bottleneck there is making enough octadic capacitors to shorten the timers (constantly running out of gold for those).
So that's my analysis of the current time sink, and that's JUST the naquadah processing. These stargates require alot more materials to make, and I haven't really looked at the time sink involved in those yet. Not sure if this is in line with what was planned, but I can tell you that for a single player doing this alone, the amount of time required to do this is just way too high.
Edit: I wanted to add that one reason this grind feels less tolerable than the others is the fact that by the time you get to the point where you are making a stargate, you've completed just about everything else there is to do. My quest book is pretty much completed except the stargate section. It's a huge bottleneck of time and materials with little else to do while you wait on all of this to finish.